Google is letting web users use its January 2001 search index as part of their 10-year birthday celebrations.

“We dusted it off and took it for a spin, gobsmacked to see how different the web was in early 2001,” states the official Google blog. “We had so much fun searching that we wanted to put this old index online for everyone to play with. We thought it’d be even cooler if we could actually see the full versions of the old web pages, so we worked with the Internet Archive to link to their cache of these pages from 2001.”

It’s astounding to see the differences between the Internet now and the Internet 7 years ago. I was curious to see what pages would be found in Google’s results back in early 2001 and started searching for my high school, since 2001 is my graduating year. I had forgotten that they hadn’t created a website until much after my graduation so all I could find were old football articles.

Still curious, I searched for September 11, and obviously came up empty handed since the terror attacks did not occur until 8 months later. Google 2001 is a window to a completely different world, one without Ipods, YouTube, Dancing with the Stars, and bank bailout blues.

The search index will only be available for one month before it is again, just a thing of the past.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 2nd, 2008 at 5:31 pm by mmbailey and is filed under Google, Search Engines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.